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Thursday, 16 April 2015

Aston Martin Supercar Theme Party

This year my boyfriend’s birthday cake was in the shape of his new car – an Aston Martin – but I didn’t stop there. I decided to throw him a car-themed birthday party and you can do the same for anyone who is crazy about supercars, or cars in general.

As he’s an adult I wanted to steer clear (steer, geddit?!) of a Disney Cars theme, though it easy to pick up all sorts of partyware from many supplies if that is the theme you want. I wanted a more sophisticated supercar or Aston Martin theme.

I found these paper plates featuring a steering wheel and a related range of tableware on a couple of websites but unfortunately they were all out of stock so I ended up not buying any. There were others which might have worked but I felt were more of a Formula 1 theme than supercars.

When I made the birthday cake, I had some batter left over so used it to make cupcakes.

I'm not sure why they came out perfectly flat but that was just what I wanted!

I had ordered some rice paper discs printed with the Aston Martin logo from Ebay and put a circle of icing on each cake and the disc on top. I made the icing silvery-grey by using a little Dr. Oetker black food colouring – it’s hard to get a true black particularly with a liquid, but if what you are after is grey then this is perfect!

I also made some car cookies. A German company called Mein Cupcake which also has the UK website CakeMart contacted me recently and offered a selection of products to review and I had a wonderful time browsing their site and making a wish list. They have a massive range of baking and cake decorating supplies and the section on cookie cutters is outstanding. You can buy cutters in shapes I would never have imagined, from the Eiffel Tower to a peace sign to a guitar to the Facebook logo! I was particularly taken by the cookie cutter in the shape of the head of one Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – I guess you could describe him as the German equivalent of Shakespeare – as I did my university dissertation on him!

That might sound very random but CakeMart is actually a German company, hence the odd Germanic-themed cookie cutter or Gugelhupf cake tin. But I was using the UK version of their site, which has prices in pounds (very good prices too – a high proportion of the cookie cutters are under £3 and there are a lot of great novelty cake tins around the £10 mark) and shipping in the UK is no more than you would pay from a UK –based site – in fact less as you can get free delivery if you spend over £65. Delivery time is 2-5 working days and my parcel arrived very promptly after only two days – the only thing I would mention is that the delivery confirmation I received by email was in German!

While I was browsing the huge range of cookie cutters I found this sports car one which I knew would be perfect for my boyfriend’s birthday:

Staedter is a very well respected German bakeware brand and the cookie cutter was very detailed and sturdy. It is easy to use – I learnt after a couple of attempts not to press right down or the middle sections would cut through the cookie dough. Instead, press almost the whole way and you end up with indentations showing the pattern – which come out perfectly after baking.

I didn’t want to decorate the cookies as the cutter makes them look so good just as they are, so I decided to make the cookies chocolate flavour. I used a basic sugar cookie dough recipe with cocoa powder added, which tasted delicious. I served them with some of the leftover chocolate ganache from the cake for dipping which was very well received as an idea!

So what else did my boyfriend have for his supercar-themed party? I wrapped his presents in Batman paper as I couldn’t find anything car-related and thought that as far as supercars go, the Batmobile is right up there!

I also managed to get him quite a few car-themed presents. His main birthday present was a car photography day at Brooklands, with Jason Dodd. He did this just before his birthday and really enjoyed it – they were a small group so had a lot of one-on-one support and tuition from Jason. The best thing was that my boyfriend was able to bring his own car so got some very professional looking photos of it; there were other cars available for them to photograph as well but I gather his car was the favourite!

I think the supercar theme works really well as a party whether it's for a teenager or an adult and I'm really glad I came across the car cookie cutters as they went perfectly with the cake.

Thanks to CakeMart for the cookie cutter to review. All opinions are my own.

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